29 August 2014

Without some knowledge of joy, there would be no
poignancy to desolation.This is mirror to the philosophical point that without some experience
of injustice there would be no reason to invent the concept of justice. The This untitled painting from the Phillips Collection by Armenian
émigré artist Mark Rothko (1903-1970) may surprise you but it is a painting where the luminous aspect of Rothko's work is undeniable. Although the Rothko Chapel in
Houston, Texas is better known, the first gallery devoted to the artist was the Phillips Collection in
Washington, D.C. Designed by Duncan Phillips himself in 1960,
specifically to display four of Mark Rothko's paintings that he had
purchased recently, the room was described by Rothko as a kind of
"chapel."

For Gregory Orr,
lyric poetry is “a means of helping individuals survive the existential
crises represented by circumstances such as poverty, suffering, pain, illness,
violence, or loss of a loved one." Here, Orr refers to the
tragedy of his childhood: that he was the accidental instrument of his
brother’s death, from, Burning
the Empty Nests (1973) to his latest collection River Inside the River (2013).

The book contains
three related sections, beginning with a
version of the creation myth from Genesis"Eden and After". His Eden is static and eventless, a place to
escape from, his Adam and Eve long to speak,
to sing, to embrace language and each other.

Second is "The
City of Poetry", where Orr names the poets in whose work he has found refuge in
times of trouble, inviting readers to join with Sappho, Dickinson and
Neruda.

My best
guess is that he wrote“Ou sont les neiges d’antan” –“Where are
the snowsOf
yesteryear” – a refrainThat
followed a listOf famous
beauties he once knew.

I don’t
claim he was the firstTo lament
that bodily beautyVanishes
like melting snow,But when you
think of the city,Remember
Villon.”

In the
penultimate sectionof River Inside The River, Orr with disarming clarity writes, "I'm an old man / Made young again / By the poems I love". We have
the capacity, whether we exercise it or not, to redeem tragedy through art.

Orr writes
in short stanzas, making music out of the surrounding silence (visible as space
on the page).He distills language into
emotion, as Rothko distilled emotion into paint.

They sense
her infinitePossibility;
they’re drawnTo his
heart, large as a star.

Only some
will be summoned,Only some
will be sung.” - excerpt from the final section of River Inside the River

In 1951, Wallace Stevens said “ in an age
in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference
to questions of belief, poetry and painting and the arts in general are, in
their measure, a compensation for what we have lost.”

Dickinson
knew what she called her ‘waylaying Light’ was unwelcome to organized religion, alarming to the
pious. “When Jesus tells us about his father, we distrust him.When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but
when he confides to us that he is ‘acquainted with Grief,’ we listen, for that
is also an Acquaintance of our own.” This from one who defined herself as wicked while still a girl; she knew herself to be bold and incorrigibly open hearted. To this day,
people fret over whether Dickinson was religious, even whether she was a moral
person.Her ideas were, and still are, radical.Those dashes, so characteristic of Dickinson's work,
are like signposts that point toward the future.Like the tides, never static. And now we are able to read her poems as written by her own hand.

For further reading: The Gorgeous Nothings, a facsimile edition of her manuscripts by Emily Dickinson, New York, New Directions: 2013.

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Why The Blue Lantern ?

A blue-shaded lamp served as the starboard light for writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's imaginary journeys after she became too frail to leave her bedroom at the Palais Royale. Her invitation, extended to all, was "Regarde!" Look, see, wonder, accept, live.

"I think of myself as being in a line of work that goes back about twenty-five thousand years. My job has been finding the cave and holding the torch. Somebody has to be around to hold the flaming branch, and make sure there are enough pigments." - Calvin Tompkins